LISA16 Birds-of-a-Feather Sessions (BoFs)

BoF Descriptions

USENIX Women in Advanced Computing (WiAC) BoF
Monday, December 5, 7:00 pm–8:00 pm, Jefferson Room

We encourage both women and men who are interested in advancing women in system administration to attend. We would love to hear your thoughts on the current state of women in the sysadmin profession and brainstorm about how to combat any issues we may currently face. Thanks to LOPSA for providing refreshments. 

Students and Young Professionals Meetup
Monday, December 5, 8:00 pm–9:00 pm, Jefferson Room

Join students and young professionals to network, discuss issues in the field, and the latest happenings in the community. Thanks to LOPSA for providing refreshments.

AuriStor Vendor BoF: Why is Managing Unstructured Data SO Hard? 
Tuesday, December 6, 7:00 pm-8:00 pm, Berkeley Room

Why is managing unstructured data so hard? Why are we always struggling with data workflow, performance, and security & compliance/audit issues?  And don’t get me started on those pesky users.

Come join us for a discussion about how the AuriStorFS can make your life easier with things like: Breaking down silos with a  Global Namespace and a Security Model that can span your data centers, DMZ, public clouds and beyond; Location Transparency; No Maintenance Downtime; Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity; Distributed Administration; Multi-Layer Security; Cache Coherency; End-User self-service with online-backups & group and ACL control; and there's more!

Think of us as AFS on Steroids 

Cambridge Computer Beer and Ice Cream Social Vendor BoF
Tuesday, December 6, 7:00 pm–9:00 pm, Republic Ballroom B

Join us for beer, ice cream, and conversation as we get ready to start LISA16!

LGBTQA* and Friends
Trey Ethan Harris, Independent Consultant
Tuesday, December 6, 8:00 pm–9:00 pm, Exeter Room

For members of the LGBTQA* community and our friends to meet, network, discuss workplace and benefits issues, current politics affecting the community, and chat. Join us, we’re friendly and almost never bite!

Wavefront Vendor BoF: Data Science for Ops—Hype or Hope?
Pierre Tessier, Customer Engineering Manager
Wednesday, December 7, 7:00 pm–8:00 pm, Back Bay Ballroom AB

Interested in metrics to assure production cloud application systems at scale? Curious how the latest data science and analytics techniques are being used in preventative monitoring? Wavefront engineers will present and discuss how leading enterprises are innovating with metrics analytics for their dev and ops teams. Or just stop by for the free beer. 

Red Hat Vendor BoF: Linux Containers in the Real World
Wednesday, December 7, 7:00 pm–8:00 pm, Back Bay Ballroom C

Linux Containers are the new hotness, but how is that playing out in real environments? Let's talk about how the successes and pain points in using Linux containers. Bring your experience, stories, and questions about using containers to get a real read on what's good, what's bad, and where we're going.

Electronic Frontier Foundation
Maggie Kazmierczak, EFF Membership Coordinator
Wednesday, December 7, 7:00 pm–8:00 pm, Commonwealth Ballroom

Join EFF's Senior Staff Attorney and General Counsel Kurt Opsahl, Systems Administrator Starchy Grant, and Membership Coordinator Maggie Kazmierczak for a casual meetup to talk EFF issues, what our team's excited to be working on, and ways to join the fight to further digital civil liberties. Hope to see you there!

Training Sysadmins
Aleksey Tsalolikhin, Vertical Sysadmin, Inc.
Wednesday, December 7, 7:00 pm–8:00 pm, Exeter Room

While the SESA summit is for university educators; this BoF is for professional trainers (operating in the industry, outside academia). What are some common pitfalls and how do we handle them? What do you love about training, what do you wish could be improved?

Facebook Vendor BoF: Systems at Scale
Wednesday, December 7, 7:00 pm–8:00 pm, Republic Ballroom B

Interested in running systems at scale? Curious how some of the world's most popular services are built? Come talk to some Facebook engineers about how Facebook deals with problems of scale.

GPG Key Signing
Wednesday, December 7, 8:00 pm–9:00 pm, Back Bay Ballroom C

For more information on Key Signing Parties, I recommend the "GnuPG Keysigning Party HOWTO" document. Our format will follow the suggestions there, specifically the List Based party format. I will bring a printout of the submitted keys. Please submit your keys *at least* 12 hours (preferably 24 hours) in advance of the party to ensure your key fingerprint is on the list.

Please bring multiple forms of ID, at least one being a photo ID, preferably government issued. Other attendees (such as those coming from over seas) may not be familiar with the format of your ID. By having multiple IDs, you should have at least one that others will find acceptable. I'm bringing my passport, passport card, Global Entry card, and Indiana Drivers License.

PLEASE NOTE: If you don't submit your key in advance, we will have to go through the awkward process of you reading your key aloud so that everyone attending can write down your fingerprint. This can be a bother and not everyone may be willing to go to that extra effort. Please submit your key in advance or bring some handout with your Key ID and the key fingerprint. Printing this info on the back of business cards is probably acceptable. We will complete authentication of the keys that were submitted in advance before we do any "walk-in" keys.

If you have any questions, feel free to send me email at nick.bebout@usi.edu

LISA17 Organizers BoF
Wednesday, December 7, 8:00 pm–9:00 pm, Commonwealth Ballroom

Want to get more involved with LISA? Come talk with the LISA17 Program Co-Chairs about the roles available for helping put together LISA17.

Summit for Educators in Systems Administration (SESA)
Wednesday, December 7, 8:00 pm–9:00 pm, Exeter Room

Come join fellow educators in system administration for a discussion about topics relevant to system administration education. This is an informal follow-up to SESA'16. All LISA attendees are invited.

Join us for a discussion where we will share our approach, and hope to learn what you have been doing to try and teach the proverbial ‘old dogs’ some of the new tricks.

Pythian Vendor BoF: Bringing SRE to the Seasoned Ops Professional
Wednesday, December 7, 8:00 pm–9:00 pm, Jefferson Room

Stacki Vendor BoF: Server Huggers Unite
Wednesday, December 7, 8:00 pm–9:00 pm, Republic Ballroom B

You're not Facebook, Google, or Apple. But you still want to manage and scale your bare metal or VM infrastructure quickly and efficiently without scaling the people.You should be able to do in hours what now takes you weeks - in minutes what now takes you hours. You should be able to manage a 20–1000+ node cluster with just a few admins and deliver services at the speed you deliver cloud or VM solutions. Let's talk about the installation and DevOps tools you're using to do that. We (the sponsors of the BOF) can talk about Rocks and Stacki (essentially a Rocks fork) and various other tools we've used, evaluated, or tested throughout our Linux careers. Bring your methods, tools, and ideas on what you want to want to see as we move into the next generation of deployment practices. 

Hiring Managers Discussion
Wednesday, December 7, 9:00 pm–10:00 pm, Exeter Room

If you're a hiring manager, what are you looking for in hiring at LISA? Can you find the right people here? If not, why not? What could USENIX change about the conference to draw the right people whom you would consider hiring? What challenges do you face in trying to recruit people? Join us for a discussion among hiring managers, educators in system administration, and LISA conference organizers to better understand what hiring managers need from LISA and to allow hiring managers to share with one another how they've solved challenges themselves.

The Benefits of Using FreeBSD
Ed Maste
Wednesday, December 7, 9:00 pm–10:00 pm, Jefferson Room

Documentation: The Good, the Bad, the ANY Key
Matt Jones, Yieldbot
Thursday, December 8, 8:30 pm–9:30 pm, Exeter Room

Everybody loves to lament that the documentation is horrible. There are several ways to write and maintain effective documentation. Nearly every major language has a specific formats including PyDoc, PerlDoc, YardDocs, GoDoc, etc. There are also general purpose languages such as Markdown and the granddaddy Tex. Lets come together to share and discuss how to generate and maintain developer and operational documentation in an automated and sustainable manner. The better the documentation is, the less time that is spent answering the same questions and the easier it is to write and maintain...well, you get the point.

Cloud HPC
Ben Cotton, Cycle Computing
Thursday, December 8, 8:30 pm–9:30 pm, Jefferson Room

Let's talk about the challenges and opportunities in supporting high performance and high throughput computing in the public cloud. How is cloud HPC different? How is it the same? How can sysadmins meet their users' needs without losing their minds?

DevOps Poetry Slam
Amye Scavarda, gluster.org
Thursday, December 8, 9:30 pm–10:30 pm, Back Bay Ballroom C

The DevOps Poetry Slam returns! Please come prepared with your favorite prose, dramatic readings of release notes, outage statuses and other found poetry from the world of system administration.

Last-Minute Lightning Talks
Dennis Buskohl, Argonne National Laboratory
Thursday, December 8, 10:30 pm–11:30 pm, Back Bay Ballroom C

Description: Do you have something that you would like to share with your peers and can fit it within five minutes? Go to https://goo.gl/forms/ULuG3tIKBBvNKkUx2 to submit your topic.